Television Channels, Robots, and Product Usage

I have a love/hate relationship with TV.  At any given moment, I can stream hundreds of channels into my home, and technologically speaking, that’s really cool.  That’s the part I love.  But good luck trying to find just one channel at any given time that has anything remotely worth watching.  I dare you.

No luck?  Of course not.  It can’t be done.  And that’s the part I hate.

Between my wife and me, there are less than a dozen channels that we ever watch.  If we could just pay for those channels and slough off the rest, our monthly cable bill would be about $1.75.  But no.  To get cable service, we have to buy the “bundle” of channels that no one—absolutely no one—wants to watch under any circumstances.  Someday, I would love to name some of the worst offending channels, because let’s face it, they deserve to be ostracized.

Anyway, there’s a day coming—I’m convinced—when bundling will be given the unceremonious death it so righteously deserves.  Television channels will be purchased a la carte, and individual subscribers will be able to customize their home entertainment options.  This business of force-feeding the TV-watching public content that they don’t want is dying, and in my opinion, that death can’t come swiftly enough.

In the mean time, I’m exploring other options for home entertainment.  Option 1: Cancel TV altogether and read more.  Option 2: Replace cable with a combination of Netflix and Hulu.  Guess which one is far and away the clear front-runner. Which brings me to the set up of this post.  The other day, I’m scrolling through Netflix trying to find something to watch.  One of the categories Netflix presented me with was “Underdog Movies.”

I’ve always loved Underdog, so I took a look-see.  As you might expect, there were all sorts of movies where the protagonist battles against overwhelming odds to succeed, which he ultimately does.  And that’s when something caught my eye.  By happenstance, Netflix had positioned 2 unlikely moves—whose underdog status is questionable at best—next to each other: The Terminator and Short Circuit.

Maybe you’ve never heard of Short Circuit.  It’s a loveable movie from the mid-1980s starring Steve Guttenberg (from Police Academy) and Johnny 5, a military robot who gets struck by lightening, becomes self-aware, and decides that it doesn’t want to spend its existence as a weapon.  The Terminator needs no introduction.

There are significant differences between these films.  Most notably, whereas The Terminator is a violent story of machines rising up against humanity, Short Circuit is a heart-warming story of humanity fighting for the right of a machine to live its life in peaceful co-existence.  However, there’s a subtle, underlying common thread.  In both films, artificial robotic intelligence acquires true consciousness, and then, based on the way that the machine is treated, it determines whether its relationship with humanity will be peaceful or contentious.

For example, in The Terminator, it is explained that Skynet (the artificial intelligence that became self-aware) determined that humanity was a threat to its existence, and therefore, that humanity must be extinguished as a matter of self-preservation.  By contrast, in Short Circuit, Johnny 5 learns about the beauty of life and the finality of death, and is assisted by his human creators to live freely.

Now let’s bring the point home.  Here at Abnormal Use, we’ve taken the name of our publication from the legal principle that damages caused by unforeseen, unforeseeable uses of products are not compensable; that if the use of the product was abnormal, the manufacturer cannot be held liable for any injuries that may result.  And to be sure, plenty of abnormal product use goes on.

But that’s not the only way that products cause injuries.  Sometimes they cause injuries because they’re used in the right way, but they’re just used too much for too long.  The wear and tear causes the product to break down.  It’s not the manufacturer that’s liable for the product’s failure to perform, and it’s not the designer’s fault.  It’s our own fault for thinking that products—the things we use to make our lives easier—can serve us indestructibly no matter how much we use or abuse them. Everything has its limit.  And ultimately, it’s our choice whether we respect the limitations of the products we use, or whether we exceed them.  If we choose the former, then we can live in peaceful productivity with our products for the duration of their usefulness.  If we choose the latter, then we’re inviting the chips to fall where they may.

Comments